I had my own problems.
While the senator had been in Africa, Cheri and I had tried to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Our occasional lifesaver (“babysitter” doesn’t do her justice), Melissa Geertsma, came to care for the three kids while we got dressed and went to a nice restaurant. We ordered wine and food, but at a moment when we might have marveled at how far we had come together in life, we talked instead about my twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to the Edwards family and my scheme for moving us out of Raleigh and into a house in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.
We had already purchased the land from an Edwards donor and friend named Tim Toben, and I was ready to put the house on Lake Wheeler up for sale. Cheri loved this house, the church we attended, the preschool where our kids were enrolled, and the friends who lived nearby. She dreaded packing up everything and moving a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a five-year-old to a temporary home we would occupy while the house in the woods was constructed. I was motivated by the good offer we had for the house we were selling and the prospect of eliminating a tiresome commute. The move would require us to take on a much bigger mortgage, and though I was finally earning a very good salary and getting some respect from the powers-that-be in national politics, Cheri knew I was not guaranteed a position over the long term. We were dependent on John and Elizabeth Edwards for our income and health insurance, and these people had not shown themselves to be paragons of stability, especially since the arrival of Rielle Hunter.
Cheri was right. I was wrong. But I wasn’t going to admit it that night. Instead, I said what I always said-“John Edwards is going to be president one day”-and reminded her that I had been right about him so far. Cheri had heard this before and didn’t want to hear it again on our anniversary. True to our style, we didn’t shout or bark at each other but instead seethed with emotion. With both of us feeling too upset to eat, we asked to have our food boxed to take home. The wine was on the table, so I finished it, and when the boxes came we left. The argument got worse during the forty-five-minute ride home.
Having eaten next to nothing during the day and consumed just wine and a little bread at dinner, I was not exercising good judgment when I got behind the wheel of the car. We made it home safely, but in the privacy of our house, Cheri and I went from seething to an open argument. I couldn’t hear all of her resentment for my devotion to the Edwardses and her fear that I trusted them too much. I wasn’t sensitive to how she felt about Rielle Hunter and the idea that my boss, who was supposed to be one of the “good guys,” was apparently cheating on his wife. All I heard was that she was criticizing me for how I did my job, the same job that supported our family. In the heat of the moment, I stormed out.
What happened next holds a special place in the little Hall of Shame that occupies a corner of my heart. While I was essentially driving nowhere, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights. I pulled over (again into a McDonald’s parking lot), and my heart sank as the police car slid in behind me. Part of me was glad I had been stopped before something worse had happened. (I was still under the effects of the wine I’d had at dinner.) But I also knew immediately that an arrest for driving under the influence could hurt me and my position with Senator Edwards, especially if it got into the press. Panicked, I refused to take a Breathalyzer test. The police officer, who could tell I had been drinking, put me in handcuffs and took me to a police station I knew well from having visited with Senator Edwards during our hundred-county tour.
From the first words I exchanged with the officer who arrested me to the moment a judge released me to take a taxi home, I refused to cooperate beyond giving the police and court officials the barest information about my identity. When asked about my employer, I mentioned the names of the organizations that paid me, not John Edwards. In the end, as the process led to my release, I became completely sober and terrified about my future.
At home I found Cheri sick with worry and anger, but she quickly grasped the seriousness of what we faced, namely the loss of my reputation and, quite possibly, my job and health insurance for our family. With my DWI arrest, every other concern faded in importance as we tried to protect our financial foundation.
The practical problems that befall anyone stupid enough to drive under the influence in North Carolina are more than enough to teach an important lesson. First, you automatically lose your driver’s license, which rendered me unable to work. The courts also require you to attend frequent alcohol awareness meetings (much like sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous), and you face even more punishment, including possible jail time, once you go before a judge.
With the help of Cheri and her brother, who lived nearby, I managed to get to the meetings, and I had to hire an assistant to help me get around for work. However, I still had to deal with the damage the arrest might do to my reputation and relationship with the Edwardses. I agonized for a few days, feeling the way I used to in my shameful twenties. Finally, I followed the advice I got from Wade Byrd and David Kirby and picked up the phone to call the Edwardses. Cheri sat beside me and listened as Mrs. Edwards answered, and I decided to begin by telling her what had happened. Her response confirmed all the good feelings I had ever felt for her.
“Andrew, you are family,” she said. “You don’t worry about this. John will call you in a few minutes. It’s going to be all right.”
The senator, who had been exercising on a treadmill when I phoned, called me about half an hour later. This time I was alone on our back porch. After I laid out the story and told him I was worried about my future with him, the senator’s voice dropped into a reassuring tone as he insisted that everyone faltered at some point, and he would not abandon me. “We’ve all done something like this, Andrew. I have. I know yo saveu feel like the lowest person on earth right now, but I love you. You are like a brother to me.” I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my heart.
Words like “love” and “family” make you feel a powerful bond, one that suggests an us-against-the-world kind of loyalty that is very comforting at times when you feel threatened. But this bond can also be a trap. When I told them about the drunk driving arrest, which the press did not report at the time, I handed the senator and Mrs. Edwards a bit of information about myself that I wanted to hide. It gave them a type of leverage that matched whatever power I held through my knowledge of the senator’s relationship with Rielle and of Elizabeth ’s more unattractive qualities: ambition, haughtiness, impatience.
Although we never actually spoke of it this way, years of intimacy had brought us to a point where we were all forced to ignore certain truths and devote ourselves to the shared goal of putting John Edwards in the White House. If this sounds to you like the unspoken pact that binds members of the Mafia, you are correct. Mob loyalty is based on fear, and with the crisis around my arrest, the basis for my loyalty to John Edwards was shifted from hope for a better future to an almost desperate dread of being exposed and losing my livelihood.
The similarities with the Mafia go beyond mutual blackmail. Like the Mob, the Edwards clan was willing to “whack” those who got out of line. A prime example of this ruthlessness arose as I was dealing with my DWI issue. A staffer who had developed deep suspicions about Rielle Hunter during the trip to Africa had taken his concern to Nick Baldick, who was still running operations for the senator. The aide, Josh Brumberger, was one of several people who had spoken to me about Rielle, but unlike the others, he wasn’t satisfied with my evasive reassurances. Soon after Brumberger talked to Nick, the senator brought him into the American Airlines Admirals Club at LaGuardia Airport and suggested he leave the Edwards team. Edwards made sure that Josh would remain discreet by arranging for him to have a job at Fortress Financial, but his dismissal sent a signal to everyone in the inner circle of the campaign.
The sudden disappearance of Josh Brumberger made me even more concerned about my future and the senator’s judgment. He should have taken Josh’s questions as a warning about the dangers of indiscretion, but he did not. In the fall of 2006, he and Mrs. Edwards traveled extensively to promote themselves (she for her book, he for the White House), and the senator saw Rielle and spoke to her by phone as often as he could.
Although he had not formally declared, the senator had been operating as a candidate for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination ever since the 2004 defeat. He faced two main opponents in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were similarly undeclared but already campaigning. (Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich were declared candidates, but they were not sthegiven much of a chance to win.) Some analysts would say that Clinton and Obama enjoyed an advantage in their offices, which gave them credibility with voters. They also received an inordinate amount of press coverage because of the historic prospect of a woman or a black man reaching the White House.
The senator’s personal finances were secure. He had raised a political war chest and he had a private jet at his beck and call. He began devoting all his attention to building relationships across the country, devising strategy, and putting people into key jobs. All the campaigns were performing this task. Hillary Clinton had her husband, the most experienced politician on the planet, as her top adviser. Barack Obama loaded his staff with extremely talented former Edwards loyalists like Julianna Smoot and David Axelrod. Abandoning the practice they followed in 2004, when they tapped highly experienced professionals, Senator and Mrs. Edwards chose a host of relative newcomers. Shrum and Baldick were gone, replaced by malleable young people. Our new chief of staff, Kathleen McGlynn, had been Mrs. Edwards’s scheduler and director of “special affairs” for the clothier Kenneth Cole. Jonathan Prince, a speechwriter for Clinton, ran the campaign day to day. Josh Brumberger was replaced by John Davis, a pale, mild-mannered Midwesterner who had been hired because of his contacts in Iowa.
As the new body man, Davis would be in charge of the senator’s care and feeding whenever he left North Carolina. This meant keeping him on schedule, shepherding him to and from events, and traveling by his side. Like most new staff members, he turned to me, as the senator’s longest-serving and closest aide, whenever he ran into an issue he couldn’t resolve or needed answers to questions he couldn’t ask the senator directly.
Recently married to a sweet young woman whom he obviously adored, Davis was a fairly proper and morally conservative guy who rarely swore or raised his voice or got overly excited. He was also smart and started calling me with questions about Rielle Hunter almost immediately after he took to the road with the senator. When I couldn’t give him satisfying answers, he pressed me harder. Finally, on a night when he was staying in North Carolina, I went to the hotel where he was staying (the same Courtyard by Marriott that issued the key card discovered by Heather) and sat with him and one of the senator’s top political advisers, David Medina. (Medina would eventually become First Lady Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff.)
As John and David worked their way through a supply of beer (I abstained because of my DWI), the conversation became more animated and John slowly grasped what was going on between the senator and Rielle. He also became quite profane, which I would discover was something that happened on the rare occasions when he drank.
After Medina left, he said, “C’mon, Andrew. You don’t think he could be so fuckin’ stupid as to think he can get away with it, do you?”
It was a good question, and the only answer was that the senator obviously did think he could get away with it. And why wouldn’t he? For all of his life he had been told he was special, and every year brought him ever more adulation. He had wealth, fame sd w, and a younger woman who called him “the king” and promised to do whatever he wanted her to do at any time.
For John Davis, who cared deeply about the issues and had come to the campaign as a true believer, the more important matter was, in my mind, protecting himself. My sense of commitment to John Edwards was becoming frayed, and I was not excited about working on a campaign for another year. Here I could offer some solid counsel. I told him that his best chance of avoiding trouble was to remain loyal to the senator, not Mrs. Edwards. (I suspected that some of the staff were actually more attached to her and may have been feeding her information about Rielle.) In the short term, I told him, “try to make his life as simple as possible.” In the long term, his goal should be to anticipate the boss’s needs so that he wouldn’t even have to ask. It’s like being the best friend of the quarterback in high school. You protect him even if that means helping him get away with stuff.
As I explained the facts of life to John, I recalled similar conversations with Edwards’s body men Hunter Pruette and Josh Brumberger, and the warnings I had received from Julianna Smoot and Will Austin when I took the job in D.C. I felt as if I was forcing him to abandon the idealism that had brought him to the Edwards campaign and to recognize the dark side of politics. Everyone thinks politics is dirty, but I was starting to think it was disgusting. You do it because you hope that the good you accomplish outweighs the excesses that accompany the pursuit of power. That’s how you justify it to yourself morally. But the burden of secrets and the loss of innocence-and this included my own loss of innocence-is always painful.
When I left John, I felt sorry for him. I felt even worse a few days later when I tried to remind the senator to be careful about letting too many people in on his secrets. Edwards said that he believed firing Josh had sent an effective message to everyone who might go public with information about Rielle. And where John Davis was concerned, he said, “Don’t worry about him, Andrew, he’s one of us.” The next morning, Heather North, the nanny, called and said the senator “was gone again last night.”
With a single phrase, the senator had declared that John Davis was trustworthy. Remarkably, the senator assumed that everyone, including old friends who had known him and Mrs. Edwards for decades, would simply go along. I can think of no other explanation for his decision to continue seeing Rielle and to bring her into even more public settings.
In November, after the trip to Africa, the cell phone mishap, and Josh’s removal, the senator headed for Asheville and a weekend conference of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers. (I went with him, as did John Davis.) When Rielle called from New Jersey, Edwards decided that it would be just fine if she joined the party at the Grove Park Inn. She flew in from Newark and found her way to the local campus of the University of North Carolina, where the senator was winding up a visit with students and faculty. At first she went into her Camera Girl routine, hauling out her equipment so she could capture the mome sptunt on tape, but I had to tell her she couldn’t do campaign work at an event sponsored by the UNC poverty center, so she put the camera away.
As we left the university to meet the lawyers at the inn, the senator beamed at Rielle like a lovesick teenager. He was thrilled that she had come and would spend the night with him at such a romantic hotel. Although a local staffer asked him to ride in her car so she could brief him on the next event, he insisted on riding with me and Rielle. The staffer glared at me. I rolled my eyes as if to say, What can I do? He’s the boss.
Later, at the hotel, we met his old friends Wade Byrd and David Kirby, who had been his original political backers and closest friends but had recently begun to feel neglected by him. Although he would give a brief talk to the academy on how he intended to protect trial lawyers from Republican-backed tort “reforms” that would hinder lawsuits, the senator’s main goal for this overnight visit was to heal these relationships. As he turned on the charm, I could see his old friends begin to forgive him.
When dinnertime arrived, Edwards made the move that would signal that his friends were on the “inside” and everyone else was “outside.” Instead of attending the formal dinner where annual awards would be presented-“Andrew, I don’t want to sit through that shit”-he asked me to arrange something private at a local restaurant, where he could sit with Kirby, Byrd, and a few others. His host, my former boss and the head of the academy, responded angrily to this insult, but Edwards didn’t care. As we drove away, he was completely unaffected by how he had disappointed the crowd back at the inn, but he was annoyed by one thing: The car we piled into was too small, and Rielle wound up sitting on my lap for the short ride. She told me later that he didn’t like the sight of her sitting on my lap.
At the restaurant, the senator split up the party: John Davis and Rielle and I stayed in the bar to eat, while he went into the dining room with his lawyer friends. The senator often asked for privacy when he was with political or personal contacts, so John and I were accustomed to this kind of treatment. But Rielle hadn’t been in this situation before and resented it. She fumed and complained all through the meal, and when we got back to the hotel, she made it clear she wasn’t going to be hidden away.
The rest of the evening was spent drinking until Rielle, Edwards, David Kirby, and I were quite intoxicated. (I wasn’t driving.) At some point the senator declared, “I need to be around some people,” and we all went to the hotel bar, where he could soak up a little attention from the other guests. When he had had enough love, he began to ask about Wade Byrd, who had long before retired to his room.
“Where’s the Byrdman?” he kept asking me. “Let’s go get him.”
Byrd had checked into the Gatsby suite, which was reached via a private lobby. Outside the door, the furnishings included a table and chairs with an oversized chess set. After pounding on Byrd’s door to no avail, the senator sat at the tab ssatle and moved some pieces around. For the next half hour or so, we all loitered outside the suite while the senator moved pawns and rooks and knights and repeatedly wandered back to the door to pound away. Byrd never did come out, but I got a pretty good idea of how John Edwards may have acted on party nights in his college days.
When we finally concluded that Wade Byrd wasn’t going to show, we all went back to Senator Edwards’s suite. Within a few minutes, Rielle and the senator were cuddling on the couch. Feeling worse than awkward, Kirby and I left. Kirby was flabbergasted.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked when we were alone.
All I said in response was, “Mr. Kirby, you know him better than I do.”
That night, Rielle would have eventually retreated to her own room, because the senator couldn’t take the risk of her falling asleep and reflexively answering the phone if it rang. (Once when he had answered the phone in this kind of situation, Rielle got angry and bit him on the lip. The wound was difficult for him to explain.) Mrs. Edwards had begun to call her husband at all hours of the night just to make sure he was where he was supposed to be. In time, she would also develop protocols that campaign staffers were required to use so that groupies wouldn’t be able to find him in hotels. Her orders were that callers who asked for her husband would have to mention the name of a designated staffer before being put through. On the rare occasions when she called and the senator didn’t answer, she immediately requested that hotel security get the body man to go into the room to see if he was all right. This would happen at least half a dozen times to my knowledge, but it always turned out that Senator Edwards was alone and had simply slept through the ringing.
Because Mrs. Edwards was watching the senator closely, Rielle purchased a new cell phone we came to call “the Batphone,” which she gave to him so they could stay in touch. Whenever this phone was discussed, Rielle and the senator hummed the theme song from the old Batman TV show. I often held the phone for him, to keep it secret from Mrs. Edwards, or arranged for three-way calls on his regular phone to keep Rielle’s number off his calling record.
Friends and staffers who had to deal with Elizabeth Edwards’s suspicions and saw signs of his infidelity tried not to think about the issue. I believe that David Kirby and I avoided having a frank conversation about the senator and Rielle because if we said out loud what we were thinking, we might have to deal with it directly. Also, we were powerless to do much about it.
The senator and Rielle made it difficult for me to ignore the affair, because he let me see them kiss and I had heard Rielle recount their sexual exploits and pledge her love. But he always used the lawyer’s trick of speaking in code so he could claim “plausible deniability” if it was ever needed. She would say she loved him and spoke so loudly that I s lo could hear her on the phone. He would say only, “Me too.” And if she asked him if he missed her, he would say, “That’s correct”-pronouncing it “cohhhhhhrect”-but never, “I miss you.”
I thought this practice was ridiculous, especially since we often talked about Rielle, but the senator would keep it up for months to come. Similarly, Mrs. Edwards chose to limit the questions she asked, because looking the other way could delay a confrontation and give the senator a chance to change his behavior. Of course, there was no intellectual trick that would help any of us with the feelings we had about the senator’s betrayal. I was disappointed and worried by what I was seeing. Mrs. Edwards, who had heard another woman expressing her love and lust on a strange cell phone, was hurt and angry. As Christmas approached-the first in their new mansion-she expressed her emotion by becoming more demanding and impatient with me as I tried to help her make everything perfect, from the arrangements for a tree to the presents.
The tree part was relatively easy, because Mrs. Edwards referred me to a local dealer who specialized in premium trees, which were delivered and set up in your home. As so often happened, since they were afraid of being cheated because of their fame and wealth, the Edwardses had me negotiate. I got a good discount on the asking price for a twelve-foot Douglas fir but still had to explain to her why it was so expensive. Next came the presents and one of the most unlikely, but painful, fiascoes of my long association with the Edwards family.
It all started with the Sony Corporation’s diabolically clever marketing plan for its PlayStation 3 gaming system, which was scheduled for release on November 17. Sony had generated an avalanche of publicity about the game and its features but had manufactured only a limited supply. Like almost every other boy in America, Jack Edwards wanted one. On November 15, I stocked my Suburban with Diet Coke, beef jerky, and green peppers (Mrs. Edwards was on a diet) and went to pick her up at the airport. She arrived exhausted and crabby from her book tour and medical treatments. I told her to relax and we’d get her home quickly. After she caught her breath, she said, “Andrew, do you have a sleeping bag I can borrow tonight?”
I went along, asking why she would possibly need a sleeping bag, and she explained that she intended to camp out in front of a store so she would be among the first in line on the day the Sony gaming system became available. The idea of a middle-aged, cancer-stricken, “First-Lady-in-waiting” huddling in the dark on a sidewalk for hours on end was ridiculous. I told her I would investigate the options and come up with a better solution.
The assistant I had hired as a driver heard me talk about the PlayStation problem and volunteered to jump in. I was extremely busy setting up the 2008 campaign, which had to be ready January 1, and gratefully accepted his offer. He promptly rang up the nearest Wal-Mart store and talked his way to the manager of the electronics department. He left a voice mail dropping the senator’s name and discussed the availability of the new Sony system. The next day, as shoppers all over the country waited in line to plunk down their Christmas savings for the toy, Wal-Mart issued a press release that said Senator John Edwards, a vocal spokesman for sspothe Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, had tried to jump to the front “while the rest of America’s working families are waiting patiently in line.”
With Wal-Mart’s press release came a flurry of inquiries from reporters across the country. Forced to respond, Senator Edwards explained that a new volunteer who was unaware of the Wal-Mart controversy had made the mistake of using his name in an overeager effort to get one of the gaming consoles. “He was not aware,” said the senator, “that Wal-Mart doesn’t provide health insurance or decent pay for many of its employees or of my efforts to change the way Wal-Mart treats its employees.”
If you subscribe to the belief that “all publicity is good publicity,” the PlayStation 3 blowup was a bonanza. With the campaign kickoff six weeks away, Senator Edwards was in the middle of a media blitz. In the previous week, he had appeared on Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Show with David Letterman, and Meet the Press. When Wal-Mart went after him, the senator used the attack to draw attention to his critique of the company’s employment practices. Most of the news outlets that went with the story referred to the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, so I tried to convince myself that the reporting was balanced. Mrs. Edwards did not agree. Having worked hard to cultivate a “plain folks” public image, she believed nationwide publicity about John Edwards trying to jump the line at Wal-Mart was a disaster. She sent me an e-mail headed “This is what can happen” and wrote: “This is what can happen when we ask for special treatment. We cannot ever ask for special treatment. Ever.”
Below her note, she pasted a bunch of articles from newspapers and Web sites, all of which made fun of Edwards. A typical one said, “There are two Americas, one for rich people who can bypass the line, one for poor folks who can’t.”
For the next few weeks, Elizabeth searched for these items on the Internet and sent them to me by the dozens. They arrived on my BlackBerry on weekdays and weekends, in the middle of the night, and over the holidays as I drove with my wife and kids to visit with family in Illinois. Although I apologized, explained what had happened, and took responsibility, nothing seemed to satisfy her. She was certain that I had told my assistant to throw around the senator’s name, which I had not.
As the negative comments continued in the blogosphere, she sent me an angry note, the key sentence of which was written in capital letters: “I HAVE A LOT OF TROUBLE WITH YOUR APOLOGIES WHEN COMBINED WITH YOUR OWN BENIGN DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ROLE.” When another apology from me didn’t work, Mrs. Edwards switched from expressing her anger to trying to make me feel ashamed. On December 4, she wrote: “I noticed that although you have steered clear of me, you are bringing John home tomorrow. Think of that as an opportunity to be completely honest… not to complain that I am being too harsh on you. In my view, you are not harsh enough on yourself.”
At some point, even a good soldier gets angry at the brass, and after weeks of her har seksangues I got angry. I printed out many of the e-mails I had received from her and brought them with me to the airport on a day when I was meeting the senator. Once he got in the car, I showed them to him and then told him I’d resign if necessary. When I finished, the senator recalled previous talks we had had about Mrs. Edwards, their marriage, and their difficulties. He said, “Andrew, this is fucking harassment. Don’t worry about this. And you’re not quitting.” The e-mails about the PlayStation 3 stopped that evening.
On the day after Christmas, Mrs. Edwards wrote to tell me to make sure the Christmas tree supplier would come to collect the big Douglas fir at eight-fifteen on the morning of December 29. “Also,” she added, “the kids loved their presents-thank you!”
While Mrs. Edwards, and much of America, spent the quiet days before the start of the New Year cleaning up wrapping paper and putting away ornaments, Senator Edwards jetted off to New Orleans, where dead trees and hurricane-ravaged homes in the Lower Ninth Ward would serve as the backdrop for a speech announcing the start of his presidential campaign. (Two weeks earlier, Joe Klein of Time magazine had heralded Edwards as the front-runner, with a two-to-one lead in the polls over Hillary Clinton, his nearest competitor.) Although he still mentioned the “two Americas,” rich and poor, most of what Edwards said in New Orleans focused on the Bush administration’s post-Katrina failures, his call for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and proposals for dealing with global warming and America’s dependence on foreign oil.
The policy ideas were almost standard-issue Democratic talking points, but as any campaign expert would tell you, the words the senator spoke were not as important as the staging and images he hoped the media would transmit. He appeared in jeans and shirtsleeves, and between the muddy yard, the boarded-up windows, and the fallen tree, the scene around him all but screamed “disaster area.” A casual glance at the picture would have left you with the impression that a strong leader had come to New Orleans and was about to take charge and make things better.
The event attracted lots of press attention, which you can see in the video shot by Rielle Hunter, who accompanied the senator to New Orleans while Mrs. Edwards stayed home. Wearing tight-fitting jeans, a dark fleece top, a jester-style knit cap, and a big pink scarf, Rielle flitted between the senator and the hordes of journalists and camera operators, presumably documenting the moment as the official campaign filmmaker. If anyone in the press saw something unusual in the way Rielle interacted with Edwards, it wasn’t reported. But Rielle had awakened that morning in the senator’s room at the luxurious Loews hotel, where, she later told me, she “felt just like his First Lady.”
Rielle continued to play First Lady as she spent the next few days traveling to campaign events. In Iowa, where he was leading in the polls, he signaled his Internet savvy by conducting a town hall with online participants around the world. He went from there to New Hampshire, where people noticed he had accented his shirtsleeves w sshiardrobe with a plastic “Save Darfur” wristband, and then to Nevada and finally South Carolina. Big crowds greeted the senator and Rielle at rallies in each of these early-voting states. At his last stop, before flying home, they were met by an adoring crowd of more than a thousand people.
At some point after they left the South Carolina rally, the would-be president and the wannabe First Lady began a premature celebration. The senator had one last appearance to make, a late-afternoon address in the central square of Southern Village, a planned community organized around the shops and restaurants on the square. Our national headquarters was on the second floor of a building that overlooked the retail area. Outfitted with an amphitheater and lights, the square was the perfect backdrop for a rally.
As crowds gathered at Southern Village, I went to the airport to meet the senator and Rielle as they arrived on Fred’s jet. They got into my Suburban and shared sips from a plastic water bottle filled with Sauvignon Blanc. As we approached the square, we saw thousands of people gathered in front of a bandstand. Flags fluttered behind the stage. High-powered projectors threw images of stars onto the buildings. Disney couldn’t have done a better job.
Knowing that Mrs. Edwards would be waiting for him, the senator had me drop him in a parking garage, where he could take an elevator upstairs. Before he got out, he leaned over to me and said, “Don’t let Rielle get close to Elizabeth.”
I then parked and walked to the office with Rielle. To say that everyone noticed Rielle as we walked into the busy campaign office would be an understatement. With sunglasses perched on her bleached blond hair, tight designer jeans, and a black sweater, she looked like she was taking a meeting in Hollywood, not attending a rally in North Carolina. Everyone else was dressed in more businesslike clothes and had the pale, drawn look of exhaustion that comes with working for a presidential campaign. Eyes followed her as she turned toward the restroom, and just before she reached the door, it swung open and Elizabeth Edwards came out.
For a moment, the two women were face-to-face. Rielle knew instantly that she was staring at John Edwards’s wife. Mrs. Edwards glanced past her, caught my eye, and quickly realized that this must be “the other woman.” A look of pain flashed across her face, but as she turned to go look for her husband, that pain seemed to turn to anger.
Out on the square, the Del McCoury Band struck up some trademark bluegrass and entertained the crowd gathered to celebrate the start of the campaign. Away from view, Elizabeth Edwards confronted her husband about the glowing blond woman who had obviously arrived with him from the road. However, they couldn’t discuss the issue at length because people were all around and they were about to go onstage.
When the Edwardses finally emerged from their private backstage hell, Mrs. Edwards looked stricken. At center stage, political consultant Mudcat Saunders, veteran of the 2004 campaign, took the microphone and declared himself a “redneck from Virginia Tech, a Hokie who is a recovering alcoholic.” He offered s1; a little testimony about his struggle with alcoholism and how John and Elizabeth Edwards had given him a second chance. Eventually, he worked his way to an introduction of “the next president of the United States,” and the senator instantly transformed his demeanor and walked forward to accept the acclaim of thousands. (Both of the Edwardses had this ability to shift instantaneously from private rage or anguish to public benevolence, and I had seen it so many times that I no longer took much notice.)
The hour was late, and the weather was cold. Edwards’s brief talk covered health care, the war in Iraq, global warming, and the need for change in Washington. He finished with a call for everyone to roll up their sleeves, dig into their pockets, and wear out some shoe leather to win an election that “isn’t about me,” said the senator, “but is about all of us.”
As he finished and the cheering reached a crescendo, no one who looked at the scene could have guessed that the senator’s marriage was coming apart at the seams because his wife had just stumbled upon his mistress, who stood mere yards away. All anyone in the crowd knew was that by announcing early, John Edwards had landed the first punch in the fight for the nomination. Conventional wisdom held that Hillary Clinton was such a polarizing figure that she could never win a general election. Barack Obama was so little known that he seemed to be positioning himself to take the second seat on the ticket, as candidate for vice president of a future White House run. This left John Edwards as the logical and likely choice.
That night, I drove the Edwardses home in silence. The next…
What I wouldn’t find out for many months was that the senator had told Elizabeth that although he had indulged in a “one-night” fling with Rielle, in recent weeks she had become my mistress! And that’s why we were together as we arrived at Southern Village.